5 ways to stay connected while working from home this summer

Summer is here, and if you have the opportunity to work from home you are probably eager to have some days in the sun with the laptop on your lap (yes – pun intended). Luckily, it’s easy to keep in touch over the summer no matter where you are working. So go get that tan on and enjoy your summer. Here are 5 ways to stay connected with your colleagues – virtually.

1) Be available

It may be tempting to sleep long into the day and work late at night, but even though you are not physically in the office, it is important that you are somewhat available when your colleagues are. That will ensure efficient and instant communication because you are working the same hours.

How can you be available?

You should at least identify the busiest hours at the office and make sure you are on for responding within minutes.

Also: Check in regularly. Ask if there are something special going on, something that you should know about or something you can do for others to help out, even if you're not there.

2) Be proactive

When things are happening at a fast pace, people that are not physically present can easily be forgotten. Things slip people's minds fast. So how do you make sure you are kept updated on all the important (and unimportant but fun) things?

Add coworkers on social media and actively comment and like their posts. This will easily help establish your presence and build stronger relationships, while you’re at it.

You can also use communication tools to stay in the loop, such as Slack or Trello.

3) Make video chats your default

A great videoconferencing solution will let you conduct your video meetings from anywhere, at any time. This, combined with great sound and image quality, can make for a meeting that feels like you are in the same room as the people in the meeting.

4) “Virtual happy hour”

This is a concept CEO and co-founder of the app Waygo, Ryan Rogowski, started for his team members to make them socialize.

The concept is for people in the company to log in to a video chat after work hours and unwind with a beer in their hand and no work topics allowed. People can also share pictures, tell the group their summer plans or what they did during summer.

This is a great way to let people know each other outside of work, even if they aren’t in the same place.

5) Videoconferencing all day

A little trick to stay connected is to have a video meeting running continuously in the background, with one or a few of your colleagues. This creates kind of a similar vibe to an office with cubicles where you can’t see your coworkers if you don’t stand up, or open the browser tab in this case, but you know they are there and can ask a question or comment at any time.

This makes for a close working experience even though you’re far apart.

This can be done through a virtual meeting room (VMR), which is a digital “room” hosted in the cloud. People can call into the VMR at any time via a static URL that makes it easy to invite people and join the room using the same link every single time.